OCR Text |
Show recreating! MAKE um When Kipling, visualizing the artistH heaven, wrote of painting "on a ti V league canva3 with brushes of couieti hair," he might well have had in mind! such a task as J. Gordon Edwards set' himself In directing "Queen of Sin da," ifhe gTeat "William Fox dramatic spectacle spec-tacle of the Orient which will be presented pre-sented at the Ogden theatre starting next Sunday. It Is only recently that motion plr-turo plr-turo producers as a whole have come' to see thBt the director must bo soma thing more than tho screen's equlva lent of a stage manager Within the last year or so they have made haste to bring into the field men who had already al-ready won fame as fculptors, painters I and writers. Mr Edwards is one of ' the very few directors who saw and ! said years ago thai motion picture rll I recUng wan an art containing the ea-1 ea-1 sence of many arts, and in the pic too . It was not a one-man task, and whenever he speaks of the work he gives credit to his large staff of helpers, help-ers, research specialists, technical experts, advisers on architecture and ornament, photographers, players there are six thousand altogether The Hrst problem, after months of research had brought out of Oriental legends and traditions the connected story that no one volume had been found to contain, was that of location Mr. Edwards could have transported his entire company lo Arabia, -and filmed the scenes on the very spots where Sheba herself lived and reigned. But there was a wider gulf than that of distance to traverse tho gulf of more than three thousand years. Shebas cities have gun-- the 4Jja builH of a1V he dl-rB Is a V can find iH ! S lo llnd a convrsH "il for phtdogTWH the Sahara Itself. Th" tV of California had .pi'kJ r. 1 11 I, ..for, , but. hn.-,.;- m iW effect as Mr Edwards pfopnsedW them. What Is a de c t withotiB oasis or two? The -..nly ca.-ei ofl burning plains of Caii."oiiiia wereV l 52?i'N'i -ftc v' IsV SMS ? j-. - Jp$ w 1 j 'vjt?' Wilu.antFox itl ''"sw Production y Hj si HK tures he has directed for Mr. Fox. including in-cluding those with William ,Farnum the star, he has been guided bv this ideal In directing 'Queen of Sheba" ho attacked a task that challenged tho combined knowledge and resource of a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a historian histor-ian and a BOldelT, H was no less than to place upon the screen in dramatic form a story that had been forgotten by the Western World for more than three thousand years, and to make live again the people of a kingdom that died almost before the dawn of his- j ;line ami "free air" stations So it Edwards proceeded i t lwihi a ew o the genuine Arabian model, wish ihf. aid of experts who Kni n v )v a real Hf 1 oasis was Liki Luckily the palm tree Bv' were there. After remodeling the desert, procur-ing procur-ing a caravan of two hundred camels. with real mahouts to match, vaj a Bimple matter. It wa, when he came to building the city of Sheba and the temple of Solomon and the Tower of David, and decorating the interiors of Oriental palaces, that the real difflfiul-ly difflfiul-ly commenced. hat was the prevalMnc. typo of ar-Ichltecture ar-Ichltecture in the land oi SheUaf Any member of the Institute of ArchlteQtfl might be excused from answering. j Archaeologists as well as architects ,were called upou for dvici 'ind tfm result, combining beauty with blstorl- H I cal accuracy, was a series of huge ibuiidinsH, patterned aftor Assyrian. I Babylonian anil Egyptian models, rls- j ing like a new city on the outskirts of Hollywood. The magnitude of thia achievement nay bo opprcdalvd from the fact that one of tho buildings had to bear tho weight yf more than 5000 heavily armored men la battle, while another, representing the courtyarl oi H a palace, contained at one time nearly H 3000 men, women and children, ever) one of whom had to be strategically placed lor pictorial effect. |